Pac-12 football and basketball: Updating the TV negotiations

*** Tuesday, 5:30 a.m. update: The league will announce its TV deal on Wednesday, according to a Seattle Times report. There are no details on the network partner of the money. Obviously, things have moved even quicker than I indicated below …

My sense is that most fans have assumed for weeks that the league would sign a lucrative media rights deal — more than $200/$225 million, based on published reports — and that it would probably be with Fox or Comcast.

The question I have been asked more than any other is: When?

My impression has always been that late-May/early-June was the most likely timeframe, with a chance that it would stretch into late June if an unexpectedly strong bid came in late in the process.

But it appears the conference is moving more quickly than I expected.

Sources told me tonight that the Pac-12 is getting close … that it’s in the process of finalizing the contract and could have it signed and sealed within the next week or 10 days, depending on how long it takes to hash out the final details.

It could be more than 10 days, I suppose.

(In the name of transparency: The sources are familiar with the negotiations but not Pac-12 officials or employees of the member schools. I haven’t heard squat out of anyone affiliated with the conference.)

I fully expect the primary rightsholder to be with Fox or Comcast, with ESPN sublicensing games.

I fully expect the contract to pay the conference $230+ million annually.

I fully expect the Pac-12 to start its own network and form a media company that would oversee the network and the digital/online/mobile rights and a commercial arm.

And I fully expect some portion of the deal to be unprecedented — Larry Scott and his team are creative and aggressive … and they have the leverage given how desperate the networks are for live sports.

In particular, the networks want live sports on basic cable, so they can raise subscription fees.

If the league signs with Comcast, we’ll see a ton of Pac-12 football and basketball on Versus, which is getting re-branded. If it’s Fox, we’ll see loads of events on FX.

(And if it’s Comcast, I wonder if Scott will make the announcement from the Comcast SportsNet-Bay Area office in San Francisco, where there are a half-dozen empty floors — good space for the Pac-12 Network HQ, perhaps?)